Elisabeth of Austria -- I

A friend remarked that she was watching “The Empress” on Netflix (in German, “Die Kaiserin,” 2022), a new imagination of the life of “Sisi,” consort of Austrian Emperor Franz Josef and a woman whose mystery still lingers more than a century after her death. In around 2008 I hoped to write her biography but was turned away from it by agents and editors who thought it would be of no interest to readers in the United States. Stupidly, I folded, only to witness a Sisi revival in the last decade. “He who trusts his editor sleeps on straw,” as somebody said. What follows is the “sample chapter” I submitted to publishers with my proposal, dealing with the details of Sisi’s famous death in Geneva in 1898 and broken into two parts to accommodate Substack’s space requirements.

GENEVA: 1898

Elisabeth of Austria, “Sisi,” depicted by Winterhalter in 1864

“I asked myself — ‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?’ Death — was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?’ … The answer, here also, is obvious — ‘When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.’” – Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846)

The dagger that killed Empress Elisabeth of Austria was just a sharpened file, a shoemaker’s awl with a crude wooden handle, honed to a point so fine that the Empress bled to death internally without knowing she’d been stabbed. She was walking on the Quai du Mont Blanc in Geneva on September 10, 1898, headed for a ferry that would take her to Montreux, dressed in black and shielding her face with the ebony fan and leather parasol that proclaimed her incognito – in Geneva, the Empress traveled as the “Countess Hohenembs.” It was a hot afternoon, unusually sunny and warm for September. The chestnut trees had bloomed out of season, and Elisabeth’s last words before meeting her killer remarked on the beauty of the scene.

“I have never seen the mountains look so clear,” she said, gazing from the harbor to the spires of the Old Town and the Savoyan Alps in the distance. The lake of Geneva is the largest in Switzerland, forty miles long and studded with landmarks. From her place on the embankment Elisabeth could see the ancient lighthouse and the hydraulic Jet d’Eau, spewing its geyser three hundred feet in the air in celebration of the city. Closer by were the Niton Rocks and the statues of “Helvetia” and “Genève” that mark the entrance to the English Garden. On the hills above the lake the vineyards had turned from green to gold in the summer sun; swans glided and gulls swooped and everywhere were roses – forty thousand bushes in the park at the Mont Blanc bridge. But it was the rebirth of the chestnuts that brought smiles to Elisabeth’s face.

“The Emperor writes that the same has happened at Schönbrunn,” she said. “The chestnut trees have bloomed again.” She was “as carefree as an innocent child who cannot keep the news to herself,” said Irma Sztáray, her lady-in-waiting and lone companion at the fatal hour.

“Majesty,” Irma stammered, “it’s very beautiful. But the bell … the boat is leaving.” Elisabeth almost missed her own death. She had been in Geneva for less than a day, arriving on the evening of September 9 and annexing two floors of the Hotel Beau-Rivage, directly on the water, for herself and her attendants. Since August she had lived at Montreux, on the far side of the lake, where doctors recommended mountain air for the relief of neuralgia and fatigue. But a visit to Baroness Julie Rothschild at the Chateau de Pregny, where she enjoyed a five-course lunch and paused to admire the greenhouse and the aviary, left Elisabeth nearer to Geneva at the end of a tiring day; she preferred to stay the night in town, making plans to return to Montreux the next afternoon. Elisabeth loved Geneva, where the lake, she said, was “the color of the ocean, altogether like the ocean,” and an urban population helped provide her with the cover she desired: “It’s my favorite place to stay, because there I am quite lost among the cosmopolites. It gives a true picture of the human condition” – a subject on which Elisabeth, at the end of her life, was always ready to comment negatively.

“People think they control the world around them,” she said, “with their engines and ships, but they don’t. On the contrary, nature has now conquered man. Once we lived in tiny hollows and thought we were gods. Now we’re just globetrotters, rolling around like drops in the ocean, and one day we’ll realize that’s all we are.” Her restlessness was legendary. For years she had lived as a nomad, wandering through Europe with no destination and making no secret of her contempt for appearances. As “Countess Hohenembs,” a pseudonym drawn from her lesser titles, she could travel unrestricted, freed from the burdens of protocol and etiquette. Otherwise the alias fooled no one, being only a means for Elisabeth to avoid ceremonial duties as mistress of the Austro-Hungarian empire. “Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Princess and Duchess in Bavaria, Dalmatia, Silesia and Istria”—Elisabeth’s titles as consort of Franz Joseph I, head of the House of Habsburg, spread to several pages and mirrored the breadth of the Habsburg domain, a monarchy, not a country, that stretched from the western Alps to modern-day Ukraine, from Poland and Bohemia to the kingdom of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs at the tip of the Adriatic. With its twin capitals at Vienna and Budapest, the Habsburg monarchy transcended borders, uniting under a common banner 40 million Germans, Magyars, Slovaks, Poles, Turks, Italians, Czechs and Slavs. The empire itself was “a map of Middle Europe,” as Winston Churchill put it, “a microcosm of a continent, with a mélange of peoples and tongues and traditions, whose problems foreshadowed the problems of all Europe.” To Elisabeth it was only a prison. At sixty, she was stripped of her illusions.

“What’s inside us is more valuable than honors and titles,” she declared. “What is the meaning of titles? Gaily colored rags with which people bedeck themselves to hide their misery.” So determined was Elisabeth to evade the glamour of royalty that, during her drawn-out lunch with Julie Rothschild in Pregny, on the day before her death, she demanded that the Habsburg standard be hauled down from above the chateau, where it had been raised in her honor as a matter of form. Elisabeth had no use for “trifles” – her safety was not on her mind. With something like enjoyment, she rejected the offer of plainclothes protection while traveling in Switzerland, whose democratic tradition made it “a haven for the worst class of anarchists -- dangerous men,” as they were soon described, “who find too ready a home on the soil of the Confederation.” Elisabeth took no extra precautions.

“Set your minds at rest,” she told the police. “Nothing will happen to me: what would you have them do to a poor woman? Besides, not one of us is more than the petal of a poppy or a ripple on the water.” To her entourage she was franker: “I am always on the march to meet my fate. Sooner or later we all come up against it. For a long time destiny shuts its eyes, then suddenly it sees us. Every step we take to avoid that moment brings us one step closer to it. And I’ve taken those steps since time began.”

“It was after five o’clock when we left Baroness Rothschild,” Irma Sztáray remembered, and after seven when they arrived at the Beau-Rivage. Elisabeth had been a guest before, and the hotel staff outdid itself to provide her with the accommodation she required: three bedrooms, two sitting-rooms and a large parlor, stripped of furniture, covered with a tarp and transformed into a giant bathroom – “for Her Majesty was a great believer in hydrotherapy,” said Irma, “and normally began her day with a warm bath in distilled water, followed by electric massage.” Already that year Elisabeth had been to three German spas—Kissingen, Nauheim and Brückenau – after lengthy stays at Biarritz (for “salt breezes”), San Remo (for sunshine), Amsterdam, Paris and Ischl, the Habsburg retreat in Upper Austria. Here, in 1853, as a girl of fifteen, she was betrothed to Franz Joseph, “the boy emperor,” then twenty-three and just embarked on a reign that would last for seven decades. A bride had been required, children and heirs – “You don’t show a Kaiser the door,” Elisabeth’s mother had said. For Franz Joseph, it was love at first sight.

“How sweet Sisi is!” he exclaimed in his diary, using the family nickname Elisabeth never lost. “As fresh as an almond blossom, and what a magnificent head of hair frames her face! Such beautiful, soft eyes, and lips like strawberries!” After forty-five years he was still enchanted by a woman whose remoteness only added to his passion. On the wall of his study in the Vienna Hofburg, where he spent his days toiling over papers, granting audiences and petitions, administering every detail of the Habsburg inheritance, the Emperor kept a portrait of his wife by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, painted at the height of her beauty in 1864 – not the famous state portrait of Elisabeth in party regalia, gowned by Worth and with diamonds in her hair, but an intimate vision of “Sisi” in her nightgown, opened at the neck and throat, her thick, dark hair tumbling loose around her shoulders. The image was erotic, daring for the time, and for months on end, while she scoured the continent, it was as close as Franz Joseph now came to his wife. When she traveled he wrote to her every day, addressing her as “Beloved Angel, dear, dear, my only Angel,” and signing himself “Your Little Man … Come back to me. Don’t leave me alone here, Sisi. Don’t let me languish here without you. Come home.”

But the days were gone when Elisabeth felt bound by any counsel but her own. Her love for Franz Joseph had muted with time, tempered by sorrows great and small into something resembling an idea, a reminiscence of shared affection. Every now and then a telegram arrived in Vienna from somewhere on her travels: “In Gedanken vereint” (United in thoughts), and the Emperor had to be happy with that.

“The thought of being pinned to one place would turn paradise into hell,” Elisabeth confided. She had not appeared in Vienna since 1896, when, after much pleading, she assisted her husband at a state banquet honoring the visiting Tsar of Russia and upset the whole court by sporting a tattoo on her shoulder, a seaman’s anchor she wore “like a postmark” to signify that “her only harbor was herself.” Her beauty was such that it still brought gapes from onlookers, who greeted her entrance in the Hofburg, on the arm of the Tsar, “with a sort of hushed reverence. She not only gave the impression of belonging to the same generation as the young tsarina, but was so transcendently beautiful as to put the other women completely in the shade.” That night the table was laid with edelweiss, and it was said that two men had died in a climbing accident gathering the alpine flowers at Elisabeth’s command. It was the kind of story that followed her around, though she gave no heed to talk: “The Empress Elisabeth, notwithstanding her wish to be seductive, yawned a great deal behind her fan.” Now, in the last summer of her life, she let it be known that “for reasons of health” she would not participate in the upcoming celebrations of Franz Joseph’s jubilee—fifty years on the throne in 1898.

“Her Majesty the Empress and Queen has been suffering for some long time past from anemia,” said the official bulletin, “which became worse in consequence of severe neuritis in the course of last winter, following on insomnia of many weeks’ standing, in addition to which there is enlargement of the heart. Under conditions of absolute rest, her illness need not give rise to serious apprehension, but the doctors earnestly advise Her Majesty to submit to treatment at the baths.” It would have surprised the average Austrian to know that Elisabeth’s idea of rest included mountaineering, calisthenics and daily walks – more like forced marches – that sometimes lasted for eight or ten hours and left her attendants in despair: “It is recorded that one day she walked the whole way from Cap Martin to Monte Carlo and back—a distance of no less than sixteen miles.” Xavier Paoli, of the French Sûreté, whose job it was “to shadow royalties in France” and protect them from assassins, also trailed Elisabeth when she visited the Riviera and found her the most recalcitrant of targets, “a special type among the royal and imperial majesties to whose persons I was attached.” They had met for the first time in Elisabeth’s private railway car as she traveled to Aix-les-Bains from her palace at Miramar, outside Trieste on the Adriatic. Paoli wrote:

I confess that, when I stepped into the train, I experienced a keen sense of curiosity at the thought that I was soon to find myself in the presence of a lady who was already surrounded by an atmosphere of legend, and who was known as “the wandering Empress.” I had been told numerous stories of her restless and romantic life; I had heard that she talked little, that she smiled but rarely, and that she always seemed to be pursuing a distant dream.

My first impression, however, was very different from that which I was prepared to receive. The Empress, at that time, was fifty-eight years of age. She looked like a girl; she had the figure of a girl, with a girl’s lightness and grace of movement. Tall and slender, she had a fresh-colored face, deep, dark and extraordinarily lustrous eyes, and a wealth of chestnut hair. Her hair was a glory, a wonder of texture and sheen. I realized later that she owed her vivacious coloring to the long walks she was in the habit of taking. She wore a smartly-cut tailor-made dress, all in black, which accentuated the slimness of her waist. I was also struck by the smallness of her hands, the musical intonation of her voice, and the purity with which she expressed herself in French.

One disappointment, however, awaited me: my reception was icy cold. On reaching Aix-les-Bains, the Empress, whom I had asked for an interview in order to arrange for the organization of my department, answered, curtly: “We shan’t want anybody.” These four words, beyond a doubt, constituted a formal dismissal, an invitation both clear and concise to take the first train back to Paris. But I would not be turned away. I organized my service without the participation of our illustrious guest.

It was Elisabeth’s obsession – to be always in motion and never denied. “I mean to roam the whole world,” she warned, “the Wandering Jew will have nothing on me. I’ll crisscross the oceans, a female Flying Dutchman, till I sink through the waves and disappear.” Even incognito this could scarcely be done – apart from ladies-in-waiting, Elisabeth’s traveling retinue included a chamberlain, a doctor, a secretary, a hairdresser, butlers, porters, lackeys, maids, a chef, waiters and sixty-three trunks, by Paoli’s count. Most of her staff never saw her, busy with various tasks while she wandered the country from morning to night.

“She led an active and solitary existence,” Paoli remembered. “Rising, winter and summer, at five o’clock, she would go out into the air, without informing her suite, with a book and the fan she invariably carried as a defense against the tribe of tourists and snap-shotters who were always on the lookout for her. She would seek some hidden spot far away in the hills, and there sit for hours in company with some favorite author and her own thoughts. She never mentioned the destination or the direction of her excursions, a thing which troubled me greatly, notwithstanding that I had had the whole district searched and explored beforehand. How was I to look after her?” Over time, at least in France, Elisabeth grew accustomed to seeing Paoli and his agents lurking in the distance, their noses buried in newspapers or travel guides while she walked, read, climbed, spread picnics and gave coins to the villagers and farmers whose paths she used to avoid the beaten track: “On the Riviera she was known as ‘the lady in black,’ who went about with a full purse, succoring the poor when the fit came upon her.” Repeatedly she dismissed Paoli’s warnings about her safety, closing her fan over her face when he protested, “until nothing was visible but her great, wide, never-to-be-forgotten eyes.” Paoli had heard reports of Italian anarchists in Nice, “who spoke in threatening terms about the crowned heads who are wont to frequent this part of France.”

Elisabeth laughed: “What! Still more of your fears! I repeat, I am not afraid; and, mind, I make no promise.” Her first act on arriving in Geneva, outside Paoli’s jurisdiction, was to leave her hotel in search of ice cream.

“The Empress could be playful and full of fun,” said Irma Sztáray, who traveled with her that last year and left a statement for the Swiss police. “She had many brilliant days, but none so clear and cloudless as this, the 9^th of September.” Their lunch with Julie Rothschild had been such a success that Elisabeth asked Irma to send the printed menu to Franz Joseph in Vienna, highlighting the timbale de volaille and the crème glacée à l’Hongroise and urging him to bring them to the attention of the imperial chefs. “The agreeable impressions of the day had a great effect on her spirits,” Irma recalled. “She kept talking about it,” laughing and saying that she regretted not allowing herself to be photographed when Baroness Rothschild requested it. “But I haven’t sat for a camera in thirty years,” Elisabeth said, “and I believe if you have principles you have to stick to them, even if they’re just for self-protection.” At the Beau-Rivage she watered the orchids the Baroness had given her, then walked with Irma from the hotel to the Old Town, its streets so busy and crowded at night “that we could move only slowly. We were looking for a particular café,” said Irma, “a patisserie in the Boulevard du Théâtre. By the time we got there it was already late and we sat with our ice cream at the outdoor tables and enjoyed the lovely warm evening.” Elisabeth was glowing.

“Really, Irma, I don’t know why you don’t like this town,” she remarked. “It’s so beautiful, how can you not like it? I love Geneva.” Her experience of crowds could be harrowing. In Italy, not long before, on a boat tour of Lago di Garda, she had docked at Peschiera and was recognized by the size of her entourage, “greeted by hisses and hideous howls” and followed through the streets by an angry mob: “So menacing indeed did their attitude become, and so vile and outrageous were the insulting epithets addressed to the imperial lady, that she was forced to beat a hasty retreat with her party to the boat. As it steamed away from the landing, volleys of stones were hurled after it by the people on the shore.” Elisabeth put it down to her unavoidable association with “politics,” a topic she deplored: “I consider them of no importance. Every government totters to its fall from the day of its creation, and all politics can do is wrest some temporary advantage from the other side. Whatever happens is of necessity, because its time has come.” In Geneva, over ice cream, she could affect a real disinterest. She seemed content to watch the world go by until Irma, for some reason, mentioned God—“I don’t know why,” Irma protested. “But I’m very devout and, with me, everything leads to that.”

“I’m a believer, too,” said Elisabeth. “Well, not so much as you, perhaps, but I know myself and it’s not out of the question that one day you’ll find me extremely pious.” From here it was just a step into talk about death, with Irma insisting that she was “ready for eternity, that I looked forward to it with unwavering faith, and that I had no fear of death.”

“Oh, but I do,” Elisabeth said. “It’s the moment of passing, the uncertainty, that makes me tremble, and above all the terrific struggle you have to go through to get there.” She had seen death close-up and was struck by people’s unwillingness to let go, their sheer tenacity in animal torment. Many times in recent years she had uttered a prayer: “Möge der Tod mich überraschen” (May death take me by surprise). But she wasn’t thinking about assassination. She had expected to drown on one of her voyages – “The sea is longing to have me, I belong to it” – or to break her neck on a horse. If it came to that she might take her own life, as her son had done at Mayerling in 1889 – Crown Prince Rudolph, the empire’s hope, dead at the age of thirty. Ever since, Elisabeth had worn black, in mourning not just for Rudolph but a host of vanished companions. Her cousin and soul-mate, Ludwig of Bavaria, died in a drowning accident, probably murdered, after “eccentricity” cost him his throne. Her sister Sophie burned to death in a fire at a charity bazaar in Paris. The Emperor’s brother Maximilian, “fairest of the Archdukes” and Elisabeth’s favorite among the Habsburgs, lost a throne and his life in Mexico, leaving behind him a quixotic legend and a deranged wife, Carlota, now locked up in a Belgian castle and still crying to her attendants, “We will not abdicate! We will never abdicate!” Wherever she looked in the history of her house Elisabeth saw madness, betrayal and doom of a kind guaranteed to appeal to the penny-dreadfuls. Not one of her obituaries would fail to mention “the Habsburg curse.”

“I didn’t like where this conversation was going,” said Irma Sztáray, “and to change the subject I simply said, ‘In Heaven there is peace and bliss.’”

“How do you know that?” Elisabeth’s voice was suddenly sharp: “No one who has taken that journey has ever returned to tell us what he found.”